Special teacher-student relationship spans across generations
Published: June 27, 2005
Carletta Freeman is the best teacher you ever had. She is the teacher you want for your children.
That’s what families at Beverly Woods Elementary School believe, especially the Stowes - mother, children and children’s children. They believe each family member should experience Freeman’s teaching touch.
This family and this teacher are connected by a bond that a changing Charlotte could not break - a bond that kept Freeman in Room 118 for three extra years so she could teach another Stowe.
Sitting with Freeman in her second-grade classroom, you get the feeling she didn’t mind the delayed retirement. But that day comes on Tuesday, the last day of school. Freeman, 55, will have more time with her family, especially her ailing mother.
At Beverly Woods, through all the children she has guided in second and third grades over 34 years, Freeman will leave a legacy.
Through the Stowes, she will leave something more.
Everything about the story of Carletta Freeman and the Stowes has the not-quite-real quality of a fairy tale the teacher might use to settle restless children after lunch.
Who would believe a teacher finding a happy home at her first assignment, and then teaching six members of a family across two generations?
Who could imagine the smiles and tears that greet her long goodbye?
Brenda Stowe has lived in her home around the corner from Beverly Woods in southeast Charlotte since Freeman’s start as a teacher.
Stowe was a young wife and mother when she sent her firstborn, Stephanie, to Freeman’s second-grade classroom in 1973.
For the new teacher (she was Miss Ashe then) still discovering her style after only two years, Stephanie set the standard.
“She had that `thing’ within,” Freeman remembers. “She wanted to do well.”
Stowe says her oldest daughter didn’t like school that much, until she got to Miss Ashe’s room. “She knew just how to handle her, how to help her like being there.”
That’s easy to understand. Freeman’s classroom is welcoming, with walls colorfully decorated with stories and pictures - the work of young hands and minds cajoled into creativity. Grown-ups have to bend a little to appreciate the displays, designed to catch a second-grader’s eye.
Though classes at Beverly Woods Elementary end at 1:45, Carletta Freeman sat in her classroom until 6 the week before recent third-grade end-of-grade tests, addressing handwritten notes of encouragement on colored paper. It’s something Freeman does every year to calm jitters and assure anxious boys and girls that everything will be all right.
That scene sounds familiar to Stowe: “She’s so personal, so sweet, so good with all the children.”
Stephanie Stowe Hayes, now a 38-year-old mother of two, remembers how hard it was adjusting to being away from her mother for the first time. In first grade, “I was bored; I would walk out.” She might stop by the office to ask to go home, or she might just skip the office and proceed directly there.
“All the Stowe children are a little headstrong,” she says.
Miss Ashe’s class was different. “She was very challenging.”
There was something else. “Miss Ashe made me feel like I was the only person in the class.”
It was that way for everyone.
If a student had a ballgame, Miss Ashe would ask about it the next day.
If a child fell a little behind, Miss Ashe would work to help that child catch up.
“She never made anyone feel small in front of anyone else,” says Stephanie. “She always built you up.”
More than 25 years later, those lessons seemed as fresh as ever when Stephanie sent her son Jonathan to Freeman’s third-grade class. He thought his mom’s teacher “was going to be really old.”
Freeman’s warmth won him over. She took extra time with Jonathan to make him feel comfortable. As a group photograph was taken recently, Jonathan, who’s now a 13-year-old eighth-grader, remembered why he liked Freeman’s class. “I was smart back then.”
Freeman quickly switched into teaching mode: “You’re smart now. You have to think it to be it.”
Stephanie’s 10-year-old, Michael, knew from kindergarten that he wanted Freeman as his third-grade teacher.
They both asked: “What’s she like, mommy?”
“I said they would have a good time learning, they wouldn’t be bored and they had to behave or she would call me.”
“She’s strict,” Michael recalls. “That’s what I like about her. When I get older, I’ll have a good education.”
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Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson“Over the years,” Stephanie says, “she looks the same to me as she always has.”
“She’ll say, `little Stephanie Stowe, I can’t believe it.’”
Freeman might remind Stephanie of the time her dad, Gary - who died two and a half years ago - poked his head into the classroom to tell Stephanie she had a new baby sister with a head full of dark curls.
That would be Charity.
Charity Parker wasn’t too happy when she heard Freeman was going to retire before her son made it to second grade at Beverly Woods.
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